Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
Cared for by servants to the number of four.
Now when she died there was silence in heaven
And silence at her end of the street.
The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet —
He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
The dogs were handsomely provided for,
But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
And the footman sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees —
Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

Vincent van Gogh about Elisabeth of Romania:
“A childless woman is like a bell without a clapper—the sound of the bronze would perhaps be beautiful, but no one will ever hear it.”
Quoted by Vincent van Gogh In a Letter to Theo Saint-Rémy, 19 September 1889

Rodica Iulian’s novels, written in French, reflect the dilemma of the exile torn between her perceived ‘duty’ towards her native culture and the desire to establish new roots in its adoptive country. In the process of establishing herself as a writer in the West, she would reposition Romanian literature as part of the canon of European literature. In this context, Rodica Iulian’s novels reveal the misunderstandings between the Romanian perceptions and expectations of the newly experienced contacts with the French culture. (One of the above quotations is such an example, when, as late as 2001, one detects a whiff of the nightmares experienced some two decades earlier, by Iulian witnessing Ceausescu’s bulldozers, flattening the historical centre of Bucharest.)

It takes an Irishman to write the best book on Romania since the WWII – the one before the war was yet another Irish – Patrick Leigh-Fermor.
William Blacker lived in Romania for over eight years in the early 1990s and went native, not just skin deep, but truly and convincingly: he learned the language, the customs, dressed as the other villagers of Maramures, learned their skills and traditions and listened to their stories steeped in ancient history: he was accepted as one of them surrounded with great affection and respect. He further went to one of the fortified Saxon villages, in Central Transylvania where he was “bewitched” by a beautiful gypsy girl with whom he lived for three years and by whom he had a natural son – Constantin.

Herta MUELLER 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature (Romanian-born German from the Banat of Timisoara, living in Berlin) ——————————————————————————————— Herta Müller has a sharp sense of realities, as demonstrated in her article published in Tagesspeil of 17 July 2008, which is echoed by the Frankfurter Rundschau: “It is a scandal that Romania put forward as its […]